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Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Typesafe Stack 2.0 Released: Q&A with Typesafe President and CEO

Typesafe today announced the release of Typesafe Stack 2.0, the latest version of its open source software stack. Typesafe Stack 2.0 is a comprehensive platform for building applications in Java and Scala that can scale to the largest workloads in cloud computing and virtualized enterprise datacenter environments. The release adds the innovative Play web framework for the first time, and includes Akka event-driven middleware 2.0, with significant enhancements for building concurrent and distributed applications.

Because I'm new to Play, Akka, and even Scala, I welcomed the opportunity to ask the folks at Typesafe questions about the Typesafe Stack 2.0 from a beginner's perspective. The following questions were asked of and answered by Typesafe President and CEO Donald Fischer. With these questions, I tried to find out what I needed to know to determine the motivation for beginning use of Typesafe Stack 2.0 and where to start in my efforts to learn and use it.

Q&A with Typesafe CEO Donald Fischer

Question: What are the most compelling advantages of the Typesafe Stack 2.0?

Some of the most compelling advantages of the Typesafe Stack versus legacy platforms are:

Strategies for working in a world of horizontal scale. Modern software needs to take advantage of more cores and more machines, rather than faster single cores.

An emphasis on developer agility, productivity, and enthusiasm. Developers want to work quickly and focus on business logic rather than boilerplate.

An emphasis on pragmatic interoperability. The Typesafe Stack APIs can be used from Java or Scala or both; and they can be adopted incrementally. It's as simple as adding some jars to your project.

Question: How much familiarity with Scala is required to use Typesafe Stack 2.0?

While the Typesafe Stack includes Scala, and is built on a Scala foundation, both the Play web framework and Akka middleware offer native APIs for both Java and Scala. So developers can build applications that leverage all of the capabilities of the Typesafe Stack without any specific knowledge of Scala (though we don't think they'll be able to resist the added productivity that Scala provides once they get a taste).

Question: On a spectrum of 100% Java to 100% Scala with a combination of the two between those ends of the spectrum, what portion of the spectrum is supported by Typesafe Stack 2.0? (Can one use Typesafe Stack 2.0 with Java only?)

100% of the functionality in the Typesafe Stack frameworks (Akka and Play) is supported for both Scala and Java.

Question: What is the easiest way to get started using the overall Typesafe Stack 2.0?

Question: What online resources are available regarding the use of Typesafe Stack 2.0?

We've collected a variety of resources including videos from project contributors, commercial users, and the community here: http://typesafe.com/resources

Question: Are there any books available or planned that cover the individual products within Typesafe Stack 2.0 as well as the overall integrated stack?

Yes, we've accumulated a collection of books here: http://typesafe.com/resources/books
We're proud that several of these books are authored by Typesafe employees, including Martin Odersky, Josh Suereth, Heiko Seeberger, and Philipp Haller.

Question: What is the licensing for Typesafe Stack 2.0 and is it consistent across the individual products and the overall stack?

The Typesafe Stack is 100% open source. It's complemented by the commercial Typesafe Subscription, which adds support, maintenance, and tools including the new Typesafe Console. The Typesafe Console is available exclusively to Typesafe Subscription customers.

Question: What potential enhancements are planned for Typesafe Stack 2.0?

Upcoming releases of the Typesafe Stack will include additional clustering features and enhanced support for building applications that adapt to elastic cloud environments.

Typesafe Stack 2.0 appears to offer developers several advantages, one of which is the ability to learn the Scala language, the Play framework, and the Akka toolkit all while solving difficult problems associated with modern software development. The press release alludes to these problems in the sentence, "Typesafe provides the most scalable software platform designed for the computing architectures of the future -- multicore, parallel and cloud applications."

Typesafe's licensing model is a familiar one with significant product (the Typesafe Stack 2.0) available via an open source license and add-on tools available for a commercial subscription. The advantage of this is that a developer can "play" (no pun intended) with Typesafe Stack 2.0 and then later move to Typesafe Subscription as needed and desired. It has been my experience that, generally speaking, it is an advantage to have a large corporate sponsor of an open source product I am using. Corporate sponsorship tends to mean dedicated resources invested in improving and maintaining the product. Examples include the Spring Framework and Groovy (SpringSource), NetBeans and GlassFish (Sun/Oracle), Eclipse (IBM), etc. Typesafe's optional commercial support for Typesafe Stack 2.0 is potentially useful for customers, but Typesafe's apparent commitment to the product's development and maintenance is highly valuable as well.

Specific licensing information for the products of Typesafe Stack 2.0 can be found at the Typesafe Licenses page. As of this writing, this page reports that "Scala and the Scala IDE for Eclipse are available under the Scala License", Play and Akka are licensed with the Apache License, Version 2.0, and "Simple Build Tool (sbt) is available under the BSD license."

Conclusion

The press release, the answers to my questions above, and the plethora of resources available on the Typesafe site all imply a highly beneficial product. I am not in any way affiliated with Typesafe and I have not yet tried Typesafe Stack 2.0 out for myself, but it looks very promising. If nothing else, playing with it and possibly applying it to real problems might be one of the best ways to learn Scala, Play, and Akka, but one can always fall back to Java when using it if necessary.